On This Day of Mourning, We Honor Our Relatives in Chains

Today is a Day of Mourning. Not a holiday, not a moment to look away but a day to turn our faces toward truth and name what has been done to our peoples and what continues to be done still.

Across Turtle Island, Indigenous communities gather in ceremony, in protest, in prayer and in remembrance. We mourn the ancestors taken by genocide and removal, and just as urgently, we mourn the generations living through the aftershocks: the violence of colonization that never actually ended only shapeshifted.

Colonization didn’t just bring armies. It introduced systems (poverty, resource theft, boarding schools, forced removals, surveillance, addiction and criminalization) that still shape our daily lives.

These systems carved pathways that lead directly into incarceration. Today, our relatives sit behind bars not because Indigenous people are inherently more “criminal” but because the violence of this nation was built into the land beneath our feet.

And when a relative is incarcerated, the weight does not fall on them alone.

The heaviest burden lands on our women… the mothers, aunties, grandmothers, partners, daughters who hold everything together on the outside.

They are the ones scraping together money for phone calls, commissary, transportation, lawyers, and court fees.

They are the ones making sure the children have what they need, keeping ceremony alive and carrying the emotional, spiritual and financial load of staying connected.

We honor them today.

We mourn with them.

We pray for their continued endurance and healing.

On this Day of Mourning, Tending Futures extends our love to every family navigating incarceration, especially our Black and Indigenous kin in the Gulf South. Your grief is not invisible. Your labor is not forgotten. Your devotion is ceremony.

If today stirs something in you… grief, anger, love, responsibility… let that feeling move toward care.

Our Earth and Sky Collective Fund exists for this exact reason: to support Black and Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit peoples who carry these burdens alone, quietly and with incredible strength.

Your contribution is a direct act of solidarity with the women who hold our families, our communities and our futures.

Give Back Not Thanks. Contribute to the Earth and Sky Collective Fund today.

Let your offering be a prayer for liberation, healing and a future where none of our relatives are caged.

Yakoke for walking this path with us.

In remembrance, in resistance, in care.